By Cabel

Welcome to 2017… Panic’s 20th anniversary!!

No, your eyes do not deceive you. Some of you may not know that we founded our company in 1997, but it’s true. We’re older than Facebook, older than Twitter, older than Google, and somehow still kickin’.

Every year is a little different, and last year was for sure — a little bit quieter on the software front (at least publicly), and a whole lot louder on the launch-of-a-major-multi-platform-video-game front.

We’ve had a year to digest the whole (almost out-of-body) experience. I think the most rewarding part was something we don’t often get from apps: the e-mails, blog posts, YouTube videos, and forum discussions people had about Firewatch. How it reminded them of past loves, how it reinvigorated their fondness for the outdoors, how it spoke to life decisions past and present, how the ending was disappointing and/or absolutely perfect… it all made us feel like we created something a little bit more substantial than a lot of video games.

We got to support good friends in making something cool, we got to establish our name a little bit in a new industry, we got to push our marketing skills, and we learned a ton about what it takes to make and ship a game. Firewatch was also a financial success for us — a very solid return on our investment — which has created a nice cushion that I think will allow Panic to develop more software, take more risks, and try more crazy things in the future. That means Firewatch’s success is everyone’s gain. (Even you, the person who might be waiting for a new Coda!)

We’ll always look back fondly at this particular time of our lives — from the initial crazy idea, to watching the team at Campo Santo actually make something of substance, on time, and for a ridiculous budget (well, as far as games go). I enjoyed updating the folks at Panic every week with what was going on, and watching our team pitch in in every way that they could, be it QA or marketing or what have you. It really felt like a team effort.

Thanks, Campo Santo, for taking us with you on this ride.

Firewatch Photos

We also launched and ran our fictitious photo printing company, Fotodome, to deliver people’s Firewatch memories on paper. All told, we — well, June, to be specific — shipped 1,500+ beautiful sets of video game photo prints around the world. And we’re now hosting over 45,000 separate “rolls” of photos on our servers — that’s over 534,000 photos taken in the Shoshone National Forest.

Fotodome was the goofy kind of thing Panic likes to do for fun, not for profit. It made Firewatch feel a little bit more special for the people who connected with it, and it still feels awesome every time a new order comes in — and there’s usually one or two every day even now!

Coda with Touch Bar

At the very tail end of 2016, Apple added the Touch Bar to the MacBook Pro, and we were fortunate enough to get in on the ground floor — we immediately thought it might be an interesting thing to support in Coda, an app where it’s really in your best interest to keep your hands on the keyboard as much as possible. Coda 2.6 with Touch Bar landed just a few weeks after MacBook Pro. It felt good to semi-quickly add a major new hardware feature to our app.

Updates

Other than working on new things, our team is constantly updating our apps. And I do mean constantly. Here’s a chart of all the bits we got out the door in 2016:

2.5.14

2.1.3

2.5

2.0.9

4.4.12

1.3.2

2.5.15

2.2

2.5.1

2.0.10

1.3.3

2.5.16

2.2.1

2.5.2

2.0.11

1.3.4

2.5.17

2.2.2

2.5.3

2.0.12

1.3.5

2.5.18

2.2.3

2.5.4

2.0.13

2.5.19

2.5.5

☠️?

2.6

2.5.6

2.5.7

2.5.8

2.5.9

We shipped 34 software releases over the course of 52 weeks in 2016, and three of them were significant new-feature updates. Each one of them was fully tested and qualified by our expanded and improved QA team. This might be a new record for us!

It’s our goal to make sure that our software works well, constantly — that the app you paid for continues to deliver, every day.

Successes

A few things that are notable from 2016:

Our software quality is the best it’s ever been. In 2016, we moved Aaron over to join Ashur in QA, meaning we now have two, yes two!, people invested in full-time testing and release qualification of our apps. It has been a huge change from the early years of making a few educated spot-checks before pressing “deploy” and hoping for the best. I have great confidence that the software leaving our door is stable and polished. (As a case in point, the Transmit 5 beta may be our shortest ever, because we fixed so many bugs during development.)

We’ve upped our group skills. This is going to sound painfully obvious so please don’t laugh, but between conducting more regular status meetings and lengthy-but-helpful bug triage meetings, we’re doing a better job all working together to define our immediate goals clearly and make them happen.

Supporting an external project, like Firewatch, felt very worthwhile. We’d like to do more of it in the future. Does that mean we might want to support more games? If a good fit came our way, quite possibly.

We took the hiring process seriously. Driven mostly by Ashur and Heather, we approached hiring with new, more refined, structured process. We created a new recruitment page, and tried a lot of new things: blind resumes (James manually redacted all personally identifying information on each and every resume we got), outreach to underrepresented groups (not just me posting on Twitter), a fixed application window, focused deadlines for responses to keep applicants informed at all times, and more. It was a huge change for us, and it took a lot of work, but the results were worth it. Speaking of…

Our team is extremely good. I’m serious. 2016 welcomed both Jesus and Helen into our Support group, and I’m so glad they’re here. But truly every single person here at Panic continues to impress me every day with their skill, initiative, and unstoppable urge to make the best and coolest things possible. There’s a lot I can’t talk about yet, but it’s amazing to watch everyone find what they love and do their best at it. This is a world-class team, full stop.

Challenges

But not everything was super smooth:

iOS continues to haunt us. If you remember, 2016 was the year we killed Status Board, our very nice data visualization app. Now, a lot of it was our fault. But it was another blow to our heavy investment in pro-level iOS apps a couple years ago, a decision we’re still feeling the ramifications of today as we revert back to a deep focus on macOS. Trying to do macOS quality work on iOS cost us a lot of time for sadly not much payoff. We love iOS, we love our iPhones, and we love our iPads. But we remain convinced that it’s not — yet? — possible to make a living selling pro software on those platforms. Which is a real bummer!

Game development is tricky. We didn’t bear the brunt of this (thank you for everything always Ben!). But it turns out we’re a little bit spoiled in the Mac / iOS development world, what with our usually consistent tools like Xcode and mostly reliable platforms from Apple. Heck, even the App Store is blissful by comparison. Minor updates to Unity can break your game, hundreds of PC configurations make a smooth experience for all users a literal moving target, console submission processes are extremely complex, etc. This was often tough: we got so close to a Metal-powered Firewatch Mac, but Unity complexities got in the way. We’ll get it next game!

Defining roles is important. What happens when you’re truly a “flat” organization and you have a bunch of incredibly smart people that can all offer valuable input on almost every task happening at any one time? Things can actually slow down a little at times. You want the right people on the right tasks, and you want someone who can make tough decisions and process the possibilities. It’s possible we’ve outgrown complete flatness. We’ll be experimenting with this more into the future, although it’s so tricky — you don’t want people feeling excluded, and you don’t want to extinguish the passion of creating!

What’s Next

This is the part you probably care about. Here’s what we’re busy working on right now:

Transmit 5

Yeah, it’s 100% real. It’s been seven years (yes, really) since we last charged for a Transmit update. Currently in private beta testing, we’re getting tantalizingly close to the launch of Transmit 5! We don’t want to give it all away yet, but we think it’s a super solid update to this venerable and trustworthy file transfer app for macOS.

Coda

If you’re wondering what the long-term plans are for Coda, I can’t blame you! It’s been a while since Coda had a massive new release, as nice as adding that Touch Bar support was. So, what’s up with that?

The good news: we’ve been brainstorming a great deal about what it would mean to reboot Coda — tear it down to the studs, equip it for modern web development in 2017, and figure out what we can bring to that table that’s distinct and helpful. Can we make Coda leaner, faster, with more modern workflows for developing, building, and deploying web work, without completely alienating existing users who love the way it already works for them today? Can we do constant iteration instead of giant monolithic releases, and can we cook up a revenue model to support that? Can we carve out a unique identity in a universe of good (and often free!) competitors? These are the big questions. But we have a general plan, and the work is well underway.

The tougher news: this won’t happen overnight. This is a long road. This will take a while. You get the idea. I will post updates on Twitter or here on the blog when I have more to report.

To everyone who uses Coda, thank you so much for your support and your patience — this work is overdue, but we think it’ll set us up nicely for a future where Coda won’t get “stuck” for long periods of time again. (Also, feel free to e-mail us any time, and tell us where you’d like to see Coda go. We love your constructive feedback and always take the time to read and consider it.)

Misc.

It wouldn’t be Panic if we didn’t also have some crazy things in the works that may or may not see the light of day. Hopefully in 2017, our 20th year, we’ll be able to crank out something new.

Thanks

Sometimes it feels wildly improbable that we’re still here, but we’re still here.

Our good fortune is boundless. We’re fortunate to have been able to do this amazing job for 20 years straight. We’re fortunate to have found this solid group of people to work with. We’re fortunate to have the independence, opportunities, and means to try different things. We’re fortunate to have you as a customer and/or fan.

It’s been a beautiful 20 years. Let’s see where our fortune takes us next!

hmuchison

Coda –
I think it’s pretty clear from a development angle that annual “update” licenses are the way to go. This creates the impetus for faster upgrades keeps a revenue stream consistent and doesn’t strand the owner with a non-functioning product. They choose when it’s time to jump in and gain value from updates that have occurred beyond their active license. You’re going to get the complainers that expect everything free but the reality is you and your team have to eat and there is a marked for people that want better designed software. As far as features you don’t really have to hit a grand slam. Coda already sparkles with text editing features you just need to polish it up more with best in class text, Git, preprocessing and a solid plug-in architecture. I await C3

Vladi

Chris

Very exciting stuff. On that extensive list of supported Transmit upload locations I see one notable exception, Google Storage. That is unless the Google Drive option supports Google Drive and Google Storage (Google equivalent to Amazon S3). Thanks for all your hardwork!

Adrian

Jeff M

Congrats on 20 years, Panic! You’re still one of my all-time favourite companies. As much as Apple may have changed over the last 20 years, Panic has continued to embody the fun and creative spirit of the Mac community. ?

John

I’m still mourning the death of Status Board. I’ve yet to find a replacement that comes anywhere close to the capabilities, performance, and ease-of-use that Status Board had. You set the bar way too high!

Sjakelien Vleeschbaardt

Robert Palmer

As an original Transit (not misspelled) and Audion user that’s followed you since then, congratulations on 20 years! You make my job possible and easier than it ought to be, and my customers and family thank you. :) Here’s to another 20!

Steve

Joey Anthony

I recently switched to another editor so I no longer have a horse in this race, but as a former Coda user here’s my feedback. Atom, Sublime, Brackets, and even VSCode have pretty much swallowed up the general text editor market. And I’m not sure that positioning Coda directly against these tools makes a whole lot of sense. They’re updated very frequently, have huge communities, there’s lots of third party tools and plugins, and well they’re free. That’s pretty tough to beat.

To that point, Coda needs to differentiate itself in order to provide value. This is arguably exactly what Espresso 3 has done. It’s not trying to be the next Atom. It’s a tool specifically created for designer/developers who do front end work. As it happens, that also means it’s a tool created just for me. And that brings more value to my workflow than a generalized tool like Atom ever could.

And in my mind this is exactly what Coda needs to do to thrive. Maybe front end developers aren’t the answer, but it desperately needs a niche.

Paul

Scott Tirrell

Thanks for all of your hard work! I found myself moving away from Coda for one of the more focused web editors. I will definitely give it another try when updated in the future, though, and continue to use and enjoy Transmit.

Shaw

Regarding Coda, the built in FTP and Publishing features are the key reason I haven’t migrated elsewhere. Unfortunately our clients don’t run servers powered by JS with built in Git publishing; good old fashioned FTP is the only way to get those websites on the server. That said, overhauls to Coda would be quite welcome as these new-fangled editors do have some appeal. Looking forward to what you have in store!

Rob Fahrni

Steve

@Joey Anthony Just today I checked out Espresso again (I was shocked to see it was very recently updated), and while it has some nice features I wish Coda had, it lacks the one absolute killer feature that keeps me in Coda: split views.

I use Sublime in parallel with Coda as a raw text editor, but for dev work I have come to completely rely on having my markup, css, js and an auto-refreshing preview all together in one view. Having to switch between tabs/screens to edit files feels totally janky to me. So this, I think, is a major differentiator, as you put it, that Coda excels at.

Ted

I’ve purchased Coda 2 when I got my Mac about 3-4 years ago. Honestly, it’s a nice looking app but I could’ve saved the 99 bucks. I don’t even remember when was the last time I started up Coda 2. I can’t see how Coda could possibly stay afloat with things like Sublime, Atom, or my recent favorite Visual Studio Code. Granted, I hate configuring things via JSON, but these editors (especially VSCode) is light years ahead of Coda. By the time Panic would reboot Coda, the other editors would possibly skip ahead even more. I really don’t see the big deal with built-in FTP and MySQL editor either. The same way as I have to make a single click (or two) to switch to the FTP or MySQL pane, I can do a Cmd+TAB to switch over to my fav FTP program or NaviCat and that’s it. Having a built-in this or that doesn’t make any difference to me. The built-on MySQL editor cannot possibly take the place of NaviCat and a specialized FTP program can offer many tools that the built-in FTP doesn’t have. It’s a pity that Coda was left out hanging in the cold. It used to be a nice app (and it’s still nice), but I think a lot of time has passed and a lot of new editors popped up that can take the place of Coda any time.

Lunah

Thanks for the update and congrats on 20 years. I’ve moved on from Coda but still use Transmit daily.

It’s bitter sweet having super stable software that does (almost) everything I need as updates are far less than the geek in me is comfortable with. It’s great to see when developers are still working on software that you depend on and this is sometimes missing when running Panic software… It can be enough to make people wonder what else is out there so it’s great to know Transmit 5 is coming. I’ll be buying for sure.

Re; Statusboard. This should be a web app. I’d pay for it.

I’d love to see an email client from you guys. I’ve tried lots of the clients that have flooded macOS this last 12 months and non are getting it quite right.

Amy

I’m also a longtime Panic fanatic from back in the days of Transit… and I’ll be happy to purchase updates to Transmit and Coda whenever they become available. Congratulations on 20 years and best wishes for many decades more!

ssp

Marc

Congratulations, guys! I have been an avid Panic fan for many years. I love Coda and am excited for what the future has to bring. agree with a previous commenter who said that a more regular update schedule paired with a yearly subscription fee for the software seems like it would work well for things like Coda where languages, workflows, and designs change constantly. Being a web developer means many different layouts/workflows during my day – JS, CSS, PHP, and now Twig, OO PHP and the list continues to grow. To be able to plug-in and expand/change Coda for different languages/workflows would rock. Lastly, I very much enjoyed Firewatch and it surprised me – I thought it was going to be different than what it was. It was great to loose myself in that environment Keep up the great work and I’m excited to hear things are going well for the team.

Sam Grover

David Geller

Kevin Griffin

I’m sad to hear iOS isn’t panning out—apps the quality of Transmit and Prompt are something I really depend on and want to see more, not less of, on iOS. I hope something changes in the current ecosystem that makes these apps viable. It would be a great loss to those who use iOS for work if they went away!

Andi

Todd

I use Coda and Transmit daily as a front-end developer. I have 30 sites defined in Transmit, as it is perfection, and Coda is reliable and rock solid. What do I know about running a business? Not much, so please take this with a grain of salt, but I think that new customer acquisition has a greater monetary payoff than does customer retention. I feel badly that Status Board is a dead app, but you got my attention with it, and my opinion of Panic was elevated along the way. Stay gold pony boys!

David S

Luis Sosa

I had the chance to visit your office during XOXO last year and was just blown away by what a wonderful, quirky, friendly place it was. Thanks for opening your doors and here’s to many more years of success.

Chad

Congrats on the landmark anniversary. So many companies have come and gone, but Panic is still around making great software.

I’m looking forward to Transmit 5. I don’t know if there is much more that I need out of a file transfer client than what is already available, but this will be interesting to see. Almost hard to believe that it has been about 8 years since Transmit 4 was released, however I recall testing it out under Leopard, and still have a copy of 4.1.9 on my old PowerBook.

As for Coda, I’m still using version 1 for some of my occasional web development needs. I enjoy being able to quickly flip back and forth between the source code and a preview of the page. I’ve checked out Coda 2 a few times, but it just never quite jelled with my needs. A few years ago I was doing some hybrid web/mobile app development (grunt, sass, less, etc.) and used WebStorm, which worked out pretty well. However, WebStorm is on a subscription, so I can’t use it now. I really detest subscription payment models and avoid them at all costs. Are there any web page editors which integrate nicely with static site generators (e.g. Jekyll)?

Rick LePage

Congrats on your anniversary — you know that you have always been one of my favorite developers. I understand the shoals of trouble around iOS, and wish that, if anyone were to crack it, it would be you guys, but I think that it’s such a different user environment that it’s hard to see how a traditional publisher could make it work.

Best to everyone; I hope you and I can catch up when I’m next back in PDX.

Rick

Riaz Ur Rahaman

I am happy that a friend of mine recommended to purchase one of your apps on iOS but since some of the apps were being shut down, I wanted to check if prompt2 is going to survive for the next couple of years?

sakura

I am waiting for new Coda! There are a number of strong editors for web programmers catching Coda up, perhaps they are overtaking. I love Coda, helping me writing code and its way to upload files to web servers is so lovely, just like an editor plus Transmit. On the other hand, I think Coda’s syntax coloring and input completion are a little bit poor nowadays. I hope to see new lightweight but strong Coda asap. I am very happy to hear you working on new Coda. Thank you very much.

Scott R

I’m also concerned about the fate of the iOS apps. I do a lot of work on my iPad and Coda iOS is a key part of my toolbox. If the time comes, please at least consider open-sourcing before abandoning them.

Taffy Lou

Kit Laughlin

Like a respondent above, I have had Transmit installed on every Mac I have owned (and that’s a truckload); we manage large web sites and forums and use Transmit daily. Congratulations on the 20th anniversary: when you look after your greatest resources—your people—then it all works harmoniously. So many companies forget this fundamantal tenet.

Knut

Nothing is worse than bad tools. Nothing is better than good tools you can always have with you. Coda and Transmit can be with me at all times, including when travelling light with iOS. Most work is done on MacOS. When the job is urgent and I have nothing else, the iPhone SE does it too. Do not ignore this strong point in favor of your apps when looking at the commercial benefit of iOS development.

I may use bad tools when I am paid for it. Otherwise I choose and make my work fun. For me, Coda and Transmit are a pleasure to work with. Another 20 years, please.

Robert Stanford

I understand the difficulties with iOS revenue but desperately hope Coda will remain on the platform. I use an iPad Pro every day as my sole machine for web development. The current Coda feature set is great – I work directly with a remote development server – it just needs a little love and a better external keyboard workflow for those not using touch input. However, a selling point that would reallly set it apart on iOS would be a web inspector tool.

Cecily Walker

I’ve been with Panic since Transmit 1.0, so I feel a certain amount of affection for y’all, and the company as a whole. And though I have fewer reasons to use Panic software these days since my role at work has changed, I’ll still purchase your software; I even bought Firewatch even though I’m not much for playing games (and it was really difficult to play on the Magic Trackpad). Thanks for the update, and I wish you nothing but good luck going forward.

Joh

Prompt on iOS is great. Transmit on iOS is solid for its core purpose – transferring files – but the UI is a bit too cute and needs more/better/faster updates. Coda on iOS is a confusing pile. I’m also kind of annoyed that you’ve been wasting time with Firewatch, the sign on your building, etc. Why not spend that time tweaking and improving your apps on Mac/iOS AND THEN actually releasing them on a faster schedule? 20 years ago, many months between updates was expected. As an App Store customer, I expect improvements about quarterly/biannually. When’s the last time you guys added a notable feature to Transmit – iOS or Mac?

(note – posting again because it seems my earlier criticism was removed).

Vaddadi Kartick

Regarding clarifying roles, have you considered appointing a Decider? https://kartick-log.blogspot.in/2016/05/why-every-team-needs-decider.html Everyone can express their opinions as much as they want, so they don’t feel excluded, but at the same time, you have quicker decision making, and the product reflects a consistent vision rather than a mismash of everyone’s input.

Saint Esprit

At this very moment, I am synching 2 folders with 3000+ files with Transmit 4, and I am seeing a separate progress bar for each individual file, without any indication on how the total operation has progressed. I am hoping than Transmit 5 will have a global progress bar, and why not, an estimated time of completion.

Liam Dilley

Thanks Guys,
I been spamming Coda Suggestions and discussing things with the team for a while. Coda still champions many things but with visual studio with a free version now running on mac, visual studio code, Atom, Brackets and some others really pushing updates and kicking your ass in many things (due to lack of updates) and ALL FREE! There needs to be some serious work on Coda and ASAP in my view to make any ground.
You do not just want to try and keep existing Coda users, you need to claw back ones who have moved on and new people to the Panic Coda Family.

Outside the features that it needs, the plugin aspect and community adding features you guys can not / do not have time for is really important and embracing technologies such as SAAS systems and the different environment to developing on those and Amazon Infrastructures etc.

It can not happen fast but Coda really does need things sooner then later.

Roome

Chris

I’m a huge fan of Coda and the fact that a visual FTP is built into it is what sets it miles apart from other IDEs for me. I love that I can do so much within a single app.

If I had a suggestion that wasn’t mentioned here yet, it’d be that it needs a performance improvement. I’ve noticed it gets somewhat laggy sometimes. I’m not a crazy-fast typist (I’m not slow by any means), but I have had plenty of times where the autocomplete close tag will actually close the previous tag than the one I just opened.

If I had to reiterate a feature that has been requested here it’d be to drastically improve the search/find capabilities. Sublime is king of the hill in that category.

Anyway, thanks for the update! As a die-hard Coda user, I’m looking forward to seeing Coda evolve more quickly in the future.

Edir

I’m still using Coda because the other apps are too much command lines focused to make things done. And I don’t like that, it’s not good to read a manual and decorate commands, even to a coder like me, an interface can show me the way to configure or use some feature easily, that’s why I like Coda. Visual Studio has good features, but I’m still here because Coda is more friendly.